Error correction plays an important role in both communication and storage systems. Optical communication-systems typically operate at very high speeds and may involve a limited degree of parallelism via wavelength and/or polarization multiplexing. Space or time division multiplexing may significantly increase the parallelism of optical communication channels for use within computer interconnect environments. To ensure efficient utilization of channel bandwidth and avoid unwanted data bottlenecks, it is necessary to implement high speed error decoders within such systems.
Optical memories offer high storage capacities, and with volume storage techniques, can achieve very high aggregate data rates via parallel access. Optical memories however, like other storage media are prone to errors owing to media defects, noise and faulty read/write systems. Conventional error correction techniques involve decoding in a time-sequential (i.e., serial) fashion; however, the highly parallel nature of the data retrieved from page access optical memory, for example, requires an alternate solution, since such a serial decoding scheme can produce a severe bottleneck in the system.